One of my favorite hobbies I’ve recently gotten into is making and collecting rave kandi ^_^ I haven’t been doing it for very long and also dont get to go to raves as often as I’d like so my collection is still really small but I really like all of them

More detail on each of them (from bottom to top, left to right)

1. My rainbow Kali Yuga bracelet was the first piece of kandi I ever made and started the trend for me of pairing the cutsey aesthetic of kandi with uncharacteristic phrases. In the cosmology of Hinduism, the Kali Yuga is the current age of strife and decay, and for me the bracelet serves as a reminder of the imperfection of the world, but also of its cyclical nature.

2. I wasnt able to capture it very well with my crappy cellphone camera but the blue-ish beads in pairs around this bracelet have a beautiful iridescent quality to them (though they’ve been somewhat dulled by extensive wear, I still need to figure out a way to clean them). To be a doll is to no longer have to bear the burden of being a subject, and its a great state to be in even if I can’t inhabit it all of the time.

3. This flower cuff was my first attempt at a design more complicated than a simple bracelet. It took a few tries (and getting some better elastic from a friend) to get it to work but I’m really happy with it. The tension isn’t quite right but I’ll practice more and get it better in the future.

4. This is maybe my least weird piece, since love is a really really common theme among ravers (PLUR and all) but I still like it a lot. For me its tied up in my spiritual practices around love and the desire to extend love to everyone, even (especially!) my enemies.

5. I find it really fun to pair black metal motifs with smiles and hearts because, for all their misanthropic posturing, most black metal bands are actually quite silly, but I still love TRVE KVLT black metal.

6. The text on this one is long enough that it was hard to get it all visible but it read “Amor Fati,” Latin for “love of [one’s] fate.” I’ve spent probably far more time than is good for me reading Nietzsche and among the many philosophical formulations he employed over the course of his life this one holds a special appeal for me because it is at once so simple and so incredibly difficult. I hope that one day I can say without reservation that I love my fate on the micro and the macro scale.

7. Getting access to white-on-black letter beads from one of my friends I knew I had to make another black metal adjacent design. The phrase “SPEED KVLT” was floating around in my head because I had been thinking about the symbolic meaning of amphetamines: the heightened feelings of aggression they can give, their history as a combat drug, how it fits into the larger history of drugs in warfare (e.g. speculations about the famous germanic pagan bear-warriors), etc. BM has always had an aesthetic fascination with that sort of violence, and especially with violence made ritual, which for me ties into the original religious meaning of cult/kvlt.

8. This is my most boring bracelet it’s literally just colors I thought were pretty

9. This is my only bracelet which straightforwardly references a music artist. I love Bladee (and the rest of drain gang, and all my fellow drainers 🕊️🙏) and I wanted some way to show it. The colors aren’t anything special either because I made this when I was running out of beads in colors I liked.

Most of these were strung on the shitty elastic that came with the box of beads that I bought and honestly, while it worked basically alright at first, a few months of wear have proved that it doesn’t hold up well (I even had one bracelet self destruct). Like I mentioned when talking about the flower cuff, I got some nicer elastic from a friend so I’m probably going to restring the ones that aren’t already using it.

anyway thanks for reading ^.^ ily all 🫀🫀🫀

update 2023-02-11: the kali yuga bracelet was lost at a Machine Girl concert. Rest in peace my fallen comrade :(